Scientists Take the Fight to HIV Using Nvidia GPUs

Spanish medical researchers are tapping the power of thousands of networked PCs sporting Nvidia video cards to battle HIV, the virus that causes AIDs.

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Spanish medical researchers are tapping the power of thousands of networked PCs sporting Nvidia video cards to battle HIV, the virus that causes AIDs, according to the graphics chip maker.

The upshota successful simulation of the behavior of a protein called "HIV protease", which could be a key breakthrough in our understanding of how the virus matures and becomes infectious.

Researchers from the Hospital del Mar Medical Research Institute (IMIM) and Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) in Barcelona have been using the volunteer distributed-computing resource GPUGrid.net to crunch through computing processes at a "level of processing power that once was only available on dedicated, multi-million dollar supercomputers," Nvidia noted in a blog post Tuesday.

The network's GPUs are instructed to devote unused resources to the project at handin this case, demonstrating "how HIV 'scissors proteins' can cut themselves out from within the middle of poly-protein chains," believed to kick-start the infectious phase of HIVwithout interrupting normal computer use by volunteers.

Using GPUGrid.net, the IMIM and UPF bioinformaticians were "able to run thousands of complex computer simulations of HIV protease, each for hundreds of nanoseconds for a total of almost a millisecond," according to Nvidia. That exercise gave the research team a high level of confidence that the simulation represented real-world behaviors, the company said.

Next up for the team is assisting in the development of new antiretroviral drugs that could potentially stop the HIV virus from maturing into its infectious stagea major breakthrough that if accomplished, would owe a debt to ordinary PC video cards that are more commonly used to play video games.

Damon Poeter got his start in journalism working for the English-language daily newspaper The Nation in Bangkok, Thailand. He covered everything from local news to sports and entertainment before settling on technology in the mid-2000s. Prior to joining PCMag, Damon worked at CRN and the Gilroy Dispatch. He has also written for the San Francisco Chronicle and Japan Times, among other newspapers and periodicals.
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